I Belonged in Louisiana
An extended excerpt from my new book, You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis & the Biography of a Song
Today, I’m sharing an extended excerpt from my new book, You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis & the Biography of a Song. LSU Press published it on Wednesday.
I’ve enjoyed speaking about it in New Orleans, Alexandria, and Baton Rouge. Next week, I’ll be in Hammond, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge, and the following week, in Baton Rouge and Shreveport.
I’ll be talking about the book at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 23, at the main branch of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library on Goodwood Blvd. I hope you'll attend if you’re in and around Baton Rouge that day. It’s free and open to the public. You’ll hear lots of music. And I’ll be selling and signing copies.
In the meantime, you can buy signed, personalized copies from me at www.RobertMannBooks.com.
Chapter 4
I Belonged in Louisiana
In April, Collier’s magazine wrote about “hillbilly” and “race” music in a piece headlined, “Thar’s in Them Hillbillies.” The writer didn’t make it clear where hillbilly music ended and the music of Black performers began. But it was apparent that something exciting was afoot in American music, which, before now, had only two official major categories: classical and popular. (Hillbilly records had been selling well for years, but major publications like Collier’s were only now taking notice). But in the years since Ralph Peer and others had ventured south to record artists like Jimmie Rodgers, Bessie Smith, Fiddlin’ John Carson, Sleepy John Estes, and Georgia White, Americans had learned new musical languages. These included jazz, blues, and folk/hillbilly, already spawning its subgenre of Western swing.
While Collier’s cautioned that “the cult of the hillbillies may be a passing fancy,” the magazine suggested that record companies like Victor and Decca may have capitalized on something more popular and permanent. “If there needs to be another picture at this point,” the journalist observed, “the camera can leap agilely to such distant parts of South Africa and Australia where the native bushmen are busy humming a little number written by Jimmie Davis of Shreveport, Louisiana, entitled Nobody’s Darling but Mine.” The song’s real author, Floyd Tillman, earned no mention. First among artists the writer identified as hillbilly’s “big stars” was Davis, followed by singing movie cowboy Gene Autry and the Carter Family.
Davis might have been a star, but music was still his sideline. He had married a local teacher, Alvern Adams, in 1936. He and his bride lived with her mother. “I walked to and from work every day unless somebody gave me a ride,” he said. “It took me seven years to pay off all my debts and to be able to buy a car.” The problem was, he said, “I needed a better job.” In mid-July 1938, two months before he went to San Antonio to record “It Makes No Difference Now,” Davis announced his candidacy for Shreveport’s public safety commissioner. The position supervised the city’s police and fire departments. His opponents were the incumbent commissioner and a state senator supported by the political organization of the late governor and US senator Huey P. Long.
His announcement in the Shreveport Times didn’t mention his musical success. But the city’s afternoon paper, the Shreveport Journal, cited Davis’s near-decade as clerk of court while noting he “is a widely known singer and composer” of hillbilly songs. “I tried one speech without the band,” Davis recalled of that campaign, adding, “After it was all over, the people wanted to know why there wasn’t some singing. They wanted entertainment—a show. I decided if that’s what they wanted, I’d give it to them.”
Davis knew he couldn’t pretend his musical career didn’t exist, so why not use the band to attract an audience? “We drew huge crowds as we’d set up, sing some, and speak some,” he remembered. “After a while, other candidates [for other offices] asked us if they could appear with us.” He gave them each three minutes to speak. Davis sang his way into the job in rallies and events around town and on the radio. He beat the incumbent with ease.
Despite the new, better-paying position, Davis continued recording and performing. Even amid the campaign, in September 1938, he spent two days in a San Antonio studio, making his hit version of “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland.” And, the Sunday before his November 8 election, he was in Los Angeles for another session, where he recorded another version of “It Makes No Difference Now.” In 1939, he went to Houston for sessions in March and early September and to New York for a session in late September. During his first year in the commissioner’s job, Billboard credited Davis with four hillbilly hits, including “Two More Years (and I’ll Be Free)” and “It Makes No Difference Now.” The following year, in 1940, he recorded sixteen songs in three sessions in New York and Houston.
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In performances later in his life, Davis would often introduce “You Are My Sunshine” to audiences with a story about his life as a struggling singer without a hit before he recorded his signature song: “It was with three other country musicians quite a few years ago. We were barnstorming the country, trying to make a little dough. We made all the chili joints, eating hot dogs and steamers. And at nighttime, three deep in a four-bit bed—all singin’ the hard-time blues—hoping that someday we’d record a hit and things would be sweet. Then, we’d settle down on that place called Easy Street. It so happened that one July the sixth, we recorded a little ditty. It went something like this.”
Actually, it was at a session in New York on Monday, February 5, 1940, that Davis—with a Decca contract, several hits to his name, and in his second year as Shreveport’s commissioner of public safety—recorded the song that he and Charles Mitchell bought from Paul Rice the previous December. Accompanying Davis was “Charles Mitchell’s Orchestra” (previously “Charles Mitchell’s Texans”), a group featuring at least six instruments, including trumpet, clarinet, electric steel guitar, piano, string bass, and rhythm guitar. It wasn’t the ragtag, chili-chomping hillbilly troupe Davis would later portray. Tony Russell’s authoritative and comprehensive Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942 doesn’t contain the names of every musician on this session. Only Leon Chappelear on guitar and Mitchell on steel guitar are identified. Evidence points to the trumpet player as T. E. “Sleepy” Brown, a twenty-year-old Texas-born musician who moved to Vivian (north of Shreveport) as a teenager. In 1939, Brown toured Arkansas with Smokey and Bunny’s Medicine Show, an ensemble that pitched an awful-tasting laxative called Satanic Medicine. When Davis and Mitchell asked him to join this session, Brown was playing for a Hot Springs, Arkansas, Western swing band, the Skyliners. In the late 1940s, Brown would join Davis’s band after a stint in the military during World War II.
The other musicians’ names are lost to history, but not the energetic sounds they created that day. Davis recorded two songs—“Baby Your Mother” and “Roll Along, Kentucky Moon”—reminiscent of his earlier, sentimental style. In a cowboy-themed song, “Old Timer,” Davis displayed his ability as a crooner. But his rendition of “I’d Love to Call You Sweetheart” allowed the musicians the most leeway. They produced an upbeat, Dixieland jazz song that rivaled “Sunshine” for its energy, virtuosity, and lightheartedness.
[You can listen to that recording here.]
“Sunshine” was the first of the five-song session. And his buoyant rendition of it bore little resemblance to a traditional hillbilly song. It was more swing and Dixieland jazz than hillbilly, not unlike the foxtrot version the Rice Brothers recorded the year before. The musicians backing Davis in this session were among the best who had ever accompanied him. One journalist observed in 2013, “The clarinet, piano and trumpet sound like they’re about to burst right out of the song, and Mitchell’s stately guitar solo can’t escape the instrument’s Hawaiian associations or its relative newness in country music.” Musicologist Ryan Raul Bañagale wrote of the recording: “The diversity of sound present in the 1940 recording rings through immediately. This is not a standard ‘hillbilly’ record.” Even “the twang heard in Davis’s voice is mild compared to contemporaries like [the late] Jimmie Rodgers and Gene Autry.”
The upbeat tempo, the Dixieland style, and Davis’s smooth tones masked the mournful lyrics about lost love, regret, betrayal, and, maybe, retribution. Sung by another artist, at a slower tempo, and with less musical accompaniment, listeners might have perceived the song as something other than the cheerful song it pretended to be. Like the less-prominent Rice Brothers, Davis had pulled off some musical sleight of hand. Distracted by the joyous arrangement, many overlooked the melancholy words and concluded this was a sunny number about love and devotion. Only the chorus—which still defines it—fits that definition.
The evidence that Davis’s rendition of “Sunshine” was the monster hit he and others suggested in the decades since is anecdotal and confusing. One scholar declared in a 2004 academic journal article that Davis’s version “sold over a million copies in the United States.” (A journalist attributed the same sales to Bob Atcher’s December 1942 recording.) In an April 1942 article, syndicated Hollywood journalist Paul Harrison claimed the song had produced $22,000 in sheet music royalties for Davis and had sold 1.25 million records. He didn’t state if those were sales of Davis’s recording or a combination of all recordings by other artists. According to Variety, the song was a national sheet music bestseller in 1941, reaching eighth place in June.
Decades later, Billboard listed Davis’s version as the thirtieth most popular record of 1940 and big-band leader Wayne King’s recording as the forty-first most popular of the following year. The music chart aggregation website Tsort.com ranked Davis’s version as the seventh most popular in 1940. But, according to Music ID, an academic database of popular music chart information, Davis’s record was ninth. The evidence for these varied rankings isn’t clear. As Music ID’s editors noted, “Between 1920 and 1940 there are few available charts (at least that we can find). These results should be treated with some caution.”
It’s possible that Davis’s record, while not a million-seller, performed well with the record-buying and jukebox-playing public. Billboard’s 1944 Music Year Book implied that the song “sold into the millions of copies” and had “plopped at the Hit Parade heap,” although it did not specify Davis’s version. That’s probably because the popular NBC radio show Your Hit Parade ignored songs by hillbilly artists during this period.
Despite stories about the song’s success, it’s not clear that, in 1940 at least, most country music fans would have regarded Davis’s song as a blockbuster. If they had, it would be difficult to prove because of how Billboard and other publications defined a “hit” record. Before the late 1940s, radio stations rarely made records the focal point of their on-air programming. A “hit” didn’t suggest radio airplay. And in each Billboard edition in the early 1940s, the categories weren’t so much about musical styles as distribution modes and publicity: “Songs with Most Radio Plugs” (on national radio shows originating from New York), “National and Regional Best Selling Retail Records,” “National and Regional Sheet Music Best Sellers,” and “Leading Music Machine Records.” The publication wouldn’t rank “folk” records until January 1944, and even then, it listed “most played” on jukeboxes, not record sales. Before then, the magazine published a list of recordings and artists, but it wasn’t apparent how—or if—they were ranked.
If Davis’s version of “Sunshine” was the hit that some contend, it didn’t appear in Billboard in 1940. The first mention of the song among the magazine’s “Hillbilly and Foreign Record Hits of the Month” came in the July 27, 1940, edition about a version released by Bob Atcher and Bonnie Blue Eyes. In late September, Atcher’s record earned another Billboard mention for “Sunshine,” this time next to Davis’s release of “You’re Welcome as the Flowers in May.” “Sunshine” appeared again in Billboard in late October, but it was the Pine Ridge Boys’ version. In May 1941, more than a year after Davis released his recording, the song showed up once more in Billboard, identified as a hit by the Airport Boys, who recorded it in September 1940. In January 1942, the magazine listed Gene Autry’s recording as one of the top hillbilly songs.
In his impressive aggregation of song popularity information from 1900 through 1949, musicologist Edward Foote Gardner did not rank “Sunshine” as a 1940 pop hit. He lists the song (but no artist) as reaching tenth place in July 1941. Gardner shows the song charting from June through September and then again in November. But this was long after Davis released his version and a time when other artists—including Wilf “Montana Slim” Carter (1940), Lawrence Welk (April 1941), Bing Crosby (July 1941), and Gene Autry (July 1941)—had also released their versions.
Country music historians Bill C. Malone and Tracey E. W. Laird didn’t refer to “You Are My Sunshine” when commenting on Davis’s popularity in the early 1940s in Country Music USA. But they noted that his music, along with that of Ernest Tubb and others, was popular on jukeboxes in bars and taverns in Baltimore, Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Washington, DC. This was especially so among migrants from Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee, who “poured into the areas and demanded music for their own tastes.” Davis’s version of the song may have been a hit on jukeboxes (which, by some estimates, accounted for about 40 percent of all record sales in those years) that didn’t earn attention in the pages of music industry publications.
When bandleader Wayne King released his version of “Sunshine” in 1940, and Crosby and Autry released theirs in 1941, they were recognized as hits. But, despite the legend about the song that grew in later years, there’s little evidence that Davis’s rendition took the country by storm. Davis’s name didn’t appear in Billboard associated with the song until March 7, 1941, when the magazine identified him as the “writer of You Are My Sunshine.” Billboard mentioned his recording in April 1942, noting, “Gene Autry and Jimmie Davis seem to be matching each other almost song for song in the report these weeks. Both boys’ versions of You Are My Sunshine are showing high in the lists from the Midwest and the South.”
Davis may have sold a million copies of “Sunshine,” but no contemporaneous evidence exists. Perhaps his singing the song in two movies in the early 1940s contributed to the notion that his version was a colossal hit. But those movies were not released until late 1942, almost three years after Davis made his first recording of the song. Some may have assumed Davis’s recording was the hit version because people believed he was the song’s creator. Crosby, and maybe Autry, had bigger success with “Sunshine,” but neither owned the song or claimed to be its writer. Davis did and would until he died.
Davis wasn’t even the first artist to bring “You Are My Sunshine” to the silver screen. Tex Ritter beat him by almost two years, singing it in Take Me Back to Oklahoma, released by Monogram Pictures in November 1940. Autry beat Davis by over a year, singing the song in Back in the Saddle, released by Republic Pictures in March 1941. He also sang it in his film released by Republic in May 1942, Stardust on the Sage.
[Listen to Gene Autry’s version of “Sunshine” here.]
But Crosby’s version of “Sunshine” in July 1941 attracted the most national attention. It was the most lavishly produced to date, including a creative lilting guitar intro by Perry Botkin and the lush sounds of Victor Young’s Orchestra. (Botkin would play guitar on three of Davis’s 1944 hits, “There’s a New Moon over My Shoulder,” “Is It Too Late Now,” and “There’s a Chill on the Hill Tonight.”) By then the nation’s most popular recording artist, Crosby sang in a tempo slower than Davis’s, crooning in his familiar syncopated, casual style. “Unquestionably,” Billboard declared in a review of Crosby’s new single, “‘You Are My Sunshine’ is fast becoming the taproom and tavern classic of the year.” Crosby’s record peaked at nineteen on the national pop chart in August 1941.
[Listen to Crosby’s version of “Sunshine” here.]
Many in the music industry viewed Crosby’s recording of “Sunshine” as proof that hillbilly songs were becoming genuine works of art that could be sung with orchestras and swing bands, as well as with guitars, fiddles, and banjos. As Billboard noted on August 23, 1941, “This hillbilly song is already an established phonograph seller. And now that Bing Crosby comes around with a record of it, the song will probably have an even longer life.” Music historian Don Cusic argued that the “importance of Bing Crosby to country music has often been overlooked,” explaining that by recording country songs, the crooner “helped establish country music as a legitimate source of material.” In fact, Crosby’s disc featured two “hillbilly” songs. The B-side of “Sunshine” was “Ridin’ Down the Canyon (When the Desert Sun Goes Down),” a song Autry had performed in a 1935 movie, Tumbling Tumbleweeds.
Davis said that he persuaded Crosby to record “Sunshine,” insisting the singer hadn’t known about the song until Davis showed him the sheet music. That’s almost certainly not the case. The idea probably came from Decca Records founder Jack Kapp, who managed Davis’s recording career and often recommended songs from other genres, especially country, to Decca pop artists like Crosby. Crosby trusted Kapp’s judgment. “All the song pluggers that used to annoy the artists asked [Crosby] to record their song or sing them on the radio,” Kapp’s wife, Frieda, recalled. “But [Crosby] wouldn’t. He would say, ‘If Jack says I should do it, I’ll do it.’” Crosby later said, “With Jack, I felt that I was in the hands of a friend and that whatever he told me to do was right.”
Including “Sunshine,” Crosby recorded at least a dozen country songs from 1940 to 1944. These included Floyd Tillman’s “It Makes No Difference Now” in 1940, Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor over You” in 1942, Bill Nettles’s “Nobody’s Darlin’ but Mine” in 1942, and a major hit in 1943 with the Andrews Sisters, “Pistol Packin’ Mama” (a country hit first recorded by Al Dexter the same year). In 1946, Decca reissued the dozen songs in a six-disc compilation album, Don’t Fence Me In: Songs of the Wide Open Spaces.
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Davis’s day job in Shreveport city government didn’t keep him off the stage and out of the recording studios and his local radio station. He continued hosting a half-hour music show on KWKH, now every Wednesday night at eight. He performed “every weekend and [made records] during my vacation period. I had a few fellows working as a band, and I’d book them easily. We didn’t make much, but we made more than if we weren’t working. It helped me pay out of debt.” (Left unspoken was that Davis gave jobs on the Shreveport police force to members of his band.)
In 1941, Davis recorded another twenty-five songs in four sessions in New York and Dallas, with “I’m Sorry Now” becoming a hit. Late March 1942 found him in Los Angeles on vacation, where he stumbled into even greater renown: a series of roles in Western movies. When Jack Kapp invited him to lunch in the Universal Studios commissary, Davis said he was surprised to learn that Universal Pictures executive Cliff Work and actress Deanna Durbin would join them. When Work asked Davis if he would like to sing in a movie, Davis stayed over the weekend for the Monday filming. The film was Strictly in the Groove, a musical starring Shemp Howard of the Three Stooges and Ozzie Nelson. Davis had no speaking part. His appearance came in the movie’s last five minutes, and his role was to introduce the grand finale, a swing version of “Sunshine.”
Dressed in a light-colored suit and holding a large Stetson hat, Davis led with a solemn, traditional version of his song that transitioned into a rip-roaring, upbeat swing interpretation led by the Dinning Sisters.
Sensing an opportunity for greater fame, Davis signed with an agent who found him a singing role in Riding Through Nevada, a Columbia Pictures Western starring Charles Starrett. This time, Davis sang “Sunshine” with a band that the producers called the Rainbow Ramblers. Between 1942 and 1950, Davis would have roles in seven movies, including his starring role in a 1947 biopic, Louisiana. His roles singing “Sunshine” in two films released in November 1942 solidified his association with the song. Having his song featured in the movies may not have earned him much money, even after Tex Ritter and Gene Autry sang it in their films. For example, when singer Ernest Tubb went to Hollywood in 1942 to sing several of his compositions—including “Walking the Floor over You”—in a Columbia Studios film the studio paid him only fifty dollars a song (in addition to one thousand dollars for his acting role). Regardless of what the studio paid Davis for the rights to his song and singing role, the prominence of “Sunshine” in the movies undoubtedly boosted his record and sheet music sales and jukebox plays.
Movies were another vital outlet for songs, giving performers like Davis another opportunity for greater national publicity. “If you look at any list of the hit songs of the 1930s,” longtime music industry executive Russell Sanjek observed in 1979, “virtually all of them . . . are songs from either Broadway or Tin Pan Alley or from Hollywood. Almost all of them had exposure in a movie.” Appearing in movies, especially Westerns, also appealed to hillbilly artists for another reason: it broadened the genre’s appeal by helping change the image of country singers from that of uncultured hillbillies to the more romantic cowboys.
Autry had been the first hillbilly singer to become a singing movie cowboy, starring in his first Western, In Old Santa Fe, in 1934. By singing Western and hillbilly songs in his movies, the former telegraph operator from Oklahoma helped introduce country music to a broader audience. And he opened the studio doors to a generation of country performers to sing—and sometimes star—in movies. Those included Davis, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers, Bob Wills, Red Foley, Eddy Arnold, and Ernest Tubb. Grand Ole Opry star Roy Acuff made a few movies but refused to wear cowboy clothing. “I am a hillbilly fiddler and singer,” he insisted, “and if that’s a crime, I’ll have to plead guilty to it.” Davis, however, didn’t mind playing a cowboy, believing he fit the part. He was also proud that he could ride a horse without instruction.
If the prospect of a full-time Hollywood career like Autry’s beguiled Davis, the temptation to stay in California didn’t last. “I always knew I belonged in Louisiana,” he would say later. Within a few weeks of returning to Shreveport, he decided he wanted a different job. It was the one Huey Long used as a stepping stone to the Louisiana governor’s office almost fifteen years earlier: one of three positions on Louisiana’s Public Service Commission. Davis announced his candidacy for the north Louisiana seat in July, challenging the Long organization’s incumbent, John S. Patton of Homer. As he had the year before, he took his band to rallies and other events. “It wasn’t long before I found out that people just don’t want to hear some long-winded speech,” he explained after the campaign. “They have a much better time hearing a few words and then listening to some band music and a song or two.” He beat Patton handily.
The demands of campaigning for an office representing a third of the state hadn’t stopped Davis from expanding his musical and theatrical sidelines. On August 15, 1942, he appeared on the Grand Ole Opry, the popular country music radio program broadcast from Nashville’s WSM, where he sang “Sunshine” and “Sweethearts or Strangers.” The same month, Billboard reported Davis was under contract with Columbia Pictures to sing more “prairie lullabies.” In late November, he and his band went to Memphis to join Roy Acuff and other country singers at the fourth-annual Hillbilly Jamboree, attended by more than sixteen thousand country music fans. The event’s sponsor billed Davis as the “nation’s number one song writer.” At the event, a local reporter asked Davis about rumors that he had higher political ambitions. “Do you intend running for governor to accompaniment of your hillbilly band?”
Davis was cagey. “I’m just going into my new office of public service commissioner in a few days, and I’d rather not forecast any further political plans now,” he replied with what the reporter described as “a sly smile.” But Davis was already considering the race. Indeed, by the following September, he and the band would launch a historic musical campaign for Louisiana governor.
Hey Bob, where will you be speaking in Hammond and what day and time? I'd like to attend. -- Joe Mirando (mirando_joe@bellsouth.net)